Human Flourishing in

Science & Technology

(HEIDEGGER)
Learning Outcomes
At the end of this chapter, the students should be
able to:
1. Discuss what technology reveals;
2. Examine modern technology and its role in
human flourishing; and
3. Explain the role of art in a technological world.
The Question
Concerning
Technology

MARTIN HEIDEGGER
1. Technology as a Mode of Revealing
2. Technology as Poeisis: Applicable to Modern
Technology?
3. Questioning as the Piety of Thought
4. Enframing: Way of Revealing in Modern Technology
5. Human Person Swallowed by Technology
Technology
as a Mode of Revealing
Common Understanding of technology

❑ Means to an end
❑ Product of human activity
❑ Practical application of science

Do you agree with this definition of technology?

Technology is instrumental and
anthropological:

Correct but not We pursue the true

true. through the
correct.
Technology is a way of bringing
forth, making something.
What is brought forth is the truth.

Ancient Greek concepts:

• Poiesis – bringing forth
• Aletheia – truth, disclosure, unconcealedness
• Techne – skill, art, or craft

Technology is a poiesis that discloses

or reveals the truth.
Is this idea of technology
applicable to modern
technology?
Modern Technology
 Challenges forth
 Very aggressive in its activity
 Sets or brings about a setting upon
 Expedites unconcealment of nature
 Stores that which is extracted from nature
Modern technology views Earth as a
huge gas station, a representative of the
extraction,
drilling and rape
of Mother nature.
Modern Technology
Age of switches
Standing reserve
Stockpiling for its own sake
 Questioning is a piety of thought.

A process of knowing
the truth of who we are
as beings in this world.

 Martin Heidegger in
Question Concerning
Technology
 Enframing
 Way of revealing in modern technology
 Views nature as calculable and orderable
system of information (calculative thinking)
 Earth as gas station
 Conceals poeisis
 Modern physics is the herald of enframing

Meditative thinking – let nature reveal itself without forcing it.

The human person swallowed by
technology
Art as a way out of enframing
 Technology is poetic in the primordial
experience
 Nature is art (techne) par excellence
 Nature is the most poetic

• There is difference between technology and modern technology.

 It
is in questioning that we
build a way to understand.

 Technology is usually thought of as

that which solves problems but
Heidegger asserts that it is something
we must question.

 Calculative and meditative

thinking works together.
 Aristotle’s Conception of the
Four Causes was mechanical.
1. Causa materialis
2. Causa formalis
3. Causa finalis
4. Causa efficiens
Aition is an ancient Greek word which
means ‘cause’ or ‘reason’, that to which
something else is indebted’, not cause and
effect

 Aition is responsible for bringing forth

Though we have Technology Though
consigned as something enframing
technology as a that defines happens, it
tool, it belongs to how we do cannot snuff
science is out the
the realm of truth
aition. poetic
as a way of character of
revealing. technology.